Posts Tagged ‘LibreOffice’

This week has mostly been allocated to FFKP/FSCONS work. I learnt about “Special Pages” on mediawiki wikis. That was a great find, especially as I could be called upon to administer the FSCONS wiki

Furthermore, I was “volunteered” to draft a staffing proposal (i.e. make an estimate about how many people we need to execute another successful FSCONS).

Scheduling and management is so far from the things I excel at doing—mostly for lack of practice, which in turn stems from me not being interested in any of it—so naturally it didn’t take two minutes from my submission to the mailing list until greg had dutifully heeded my plea to catch as many bugs as possible, but hey, better now than in three months

For a short period of time I tried attacking the problem with planner, but I am no friend of project management software, so that struck out. I ended up using LibreOfficeCalc, which also gave me some headaches, but did eventually carry me all the way to the present version of the proposal.

What I’ve learnt about Calc:

ROUND() will properly round values up and down as expected

If you want a function which always rounds upwards, that’s CEILING

Parameters for functions are separated not by commas, but by semicolons

What I’ve come up with is that I have 162 hours which needs to be staffed by volunteers. No volunteer should be expected to work more than 8 hours during the conference (which spans from Friday evening, staffing-wise, to Sunday night), which means that we need 21 volunteers.

Other than that we need 1 “room host” per track, that’s 8 hosts, we need 1 camera person per track, another 8 people, and finally we need a senior person from the core team of organizers always in the “command centre”.

razor tried to find a funny sms the other day (which he eventually did) but I couldn’t help thinking that it could have gone faster if we’d known where the messages were stored, and instead searched for specific keywords in that database.

They are stored in an SQLite database in ~/.rtcom-eventlogger/el.db

Links

Placekitten: a service to set cute cats as place holders in your designs. Too funny to resist ;D

Although there are free (as in freedom) “office suites” (LibreOffice) I don’t care much for them. Having said that, I do have LibreOffice installed, but that is out of the need to be able to read attachments people send me.

Instead, I have collected a few applications which perform similar tasks for me:

Text

For text editing, vim obviously plays a part, although for writing (not editing) longer chunks of text I use PyRoom.

So what I end up with are plaintext files, which is not always the optimal option presentationally. This is where LaTeX comes into play.

All of a sudden, I have snazzy-looking PDFs instead of plaintext

Spreadsheets

Historically I haven’t used spreadsheets all that much, but as of late that has started to change. Calc (OO.org/LibreOffice) did the trick, so did gnumeric, but I like stuff that is light on resources. Lighter than gnumeric…

And that is where sc comes into play. It has its shortcomings, for instance, when saving to csv it saves the current value of any formula, instead of the formula itself.

Presentations

There is a LaTeX class called Beamer, which, when compiled, creates a PDF suitable for presentations.

Of course, depending on the complexity of the presentation, a simple PDF (as created by LaTeX without Beamer) could do the trick, but Beamer adds elegance to the simplicity of an ordinary PDF.

There are two applications which comes to mind for presenting a PDF-based presentation: Evince and Impress!ve (which shouldn’t be confused with OO.org Impress.

Evince is an ordinary PDF-viewer, and Impress!ve is a Python-powered presentation tool with support for OpenGL and some rather nice effects and features.

Database

I don’t particularly like Access, and I have never tried OO.org’s Base, but the idea of having a database contained in a single file always intrigued me, and for smaller applications it kind of begins to make sense.

Now, if we take that idea, of a database contained in a file, with a small library through which you interact with the database file, and we also think “lightweight”, we… well at least I did, end up with SQLite3.

The SQLite3 library has a CLI which means that even my shell scripts can interact with the database. And that is pretty frakkin cool.

Calculator

Finally, what office suite would be complete without a calculator?

True, I do most of my calculations in a nearby ipython-terminal, but ever since I discovered qalculate, and the CLI version qalc, it has stuck with me.

Why? Because you can ask it to convert between currencies like this:

$ qalc \$200 to SEK

Obviously this is only useful if you first let it fetch up to date exchange-rates from the web, but there is a setting for allowing it to do that automatically at the beginning of every program start.